Sauces Using Scallop Coral

Because most American scallops are marketed without the coral, there is little opportunity to use it in sauce making. If fresh scallops with the coral are available, the coral can be incorporated into a sauce. The most direct method is to purée the coral in a food processor (it’s firmer than sea urchin roe and thus has to be pureed before straining), strain it through a drum sieve, and combine it with butter, heavy cream, or egg yolks (as for the Sea Urchin Sauce) before using it to finish a fish sauce base. Make sure the base is slightly thicker than you want the final sauce, especially if adding heavy cream, which will lighten the consistency. If you need the sauce to be particularly stable, work 1% liquid lecithin into the scallop butter (as a percentage of the butter, not the whole sauce) and blend 1% propylene glycol alginate (as a percentage of the liquid base) into the hot liquid base.